Don’t blame Oxbridge for bad schools and unambitious teachers

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When I was at Cambridge, radical students blamed the elitist architecture for the fact that they were so white and posh.Credit:
Nick Ansell

Victor Lewis-Smith once joked that you can always tell if someone went to Oxbridge because they’ll mention it within the first five minutes of meeting you. Today, the focus is on who didn’t go. Labour MP David Lammy has dug up some astonishing statistics: nearly half of all offers made by Oxford and Cambridge from 2010 to 2015 went to kids from London and the South East. During that period, only three Oxford colleges made an offer to a black British A-level applicant every year. And the top two social classes have seen their share of offers rise.

It’s important that we don’t obsess about Oxbridge: many talented adolescents make a positive choice not to go there because there are plenty of other...